The Patanjali Kimbho app is not dead yet and is still on hold, as per company executives. The app was launched in the year 2018 with an aim to give WhatsApp a run for its money.

Yoga guru Ramdev’s ‘swadeshi’ messaging app, called Kimbho, was taken down from app stores last year, owing to privacy concerns. But the app is not dead yet and is still “on hold”, as per company executives. To recall, the messaging app was launched with much fanfare last year from the house of Patanjali Ayurved. The app promised features such as chat, multimedia, voice and video calling, video conferencing and collaboration. It was aimed to give Facebook-owned WhatsApp a run for its money.

The app disappeared from the Google Play Store and App Store after users raised security concerns. The app makers asserted that their servers couldn’t support the initial demand for the app. However, the company later acknowledged the issue and promised to fix the flaws present. The company then re-launched the app in August, which again failed to meet the expectations. It was again taken down. Patanjali, however, appears not to have given up on it completely yet.

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According to Abhitab Saxena, Senior VP and Head of IT at Patanjali, the Kimbho app is on hold for now. “Baba Ramdev Ji and Acharya Balkrishna ji will announce it at a press conference if anything comes up. As for now, the ‘Kimbho app’ is on hold,” Saxena told IANS.

When Cybersecurity experts raised concerns about poor security features in ‘swadeshi chat app,’ Patanjali claimed it to be AES encrypted. Similar to WhatsApp, the Patanjali Kimbho messaging app too offered support for videos, photos, doodle, stickers, and GIF among others.

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To run a messaging app like WhatsApp requires top-of-the-line IT infrastructure. To build and run a world-class messaging app requires a huge investment of time, tech expertise and money — and eventually needs 10 times more investment for handling servers, security issues and data breaches. Whether Patanjali would make a fresh attempt to launch the messaging app with full preparation is still not clear. But the firm still appears hopeful as it has not yet admitted to shelving it completely.